TheStreet CEO Callaway: Our traffic continues to grow

TheStreet.com CEO David Callaway made the following comments during the company’s third-quarter earnings conference call:

Thanks to the remarkable work of our marketing, editorial, tech and sales teams, under Consumer President, Margaret de Luna, we’ve booked year-over-year subscription revenue growth for the first time in more than 3 years. Quarterly churn on subscriptions is under 4% for the first time since I’ve been here at the company, and deferred revenue growth of 12% from the consumer is on pace with that of our healthy institutional business.

New subscription product like our retirement column, better performance by our newsroom in driving readers from headlines to our products like Jim Cramer’s Action Alerts PLUS and new external marketing features around social videos on Facebook have all helped widen our funnel and improve the number of leads, trials and new orders.

Also moving RealMoney and RealMoney Pro to a new content management system, has dramatically improved our look and feel as well as speed of delivery, and the implementation of Salesforce, late in the quarter and new credit card processing procedures through Zuora subscription service have played a critical role in reducing churn. These gains do not come without pain, as you can see in the results, our strategic shift to focus on subscription revenue of our programmatic advertising continues to dog us in the short term, but as I said, after the second quarter, the decline in advertising has leveled off to a rate from which we can rebuild through new revenue streams tied to events, for example.

Last month, we held our second investing boot camp this year for subscribers. An all-day event featuring stock tips from Jim Cramer, panels on tech stocks, and cannabis stocks and keynote interviews. More than 200 paying customers packed a midtown events room here in Manhattan on a Saturday morning to hear our experts. We had a group of sponsors new to TheStreet and at least one big one has followed up with an advertising campaign, which has been great. We sold our first sponsor partnership on voice content, our analysis on products like Alexa, and we’ve seen early success on our content on Apple news’ stock app, with traffic more than doubling last month and more than tripling since launch in June. That traffic continues to grow.

Chris Roush is the Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.

This website is operated by Chris Roush, who teaches “Writing and Reporting,” “Business Reporting,” “Economics Reporting,” and “Business and the Media” at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.